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Re: Das Anthropische Prinzip / The Universe Parado
[Re: fastlane69]
#63657
02/13/06 01:26
02/13/06 01:26
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 27,986 Frankfurt
jcl
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Quote:
How different is this from asking yourself "Had my mother and father not met, I would not be alive. Had my father procreated with another women or my mother with another man, I would not have been born and thus I would not be alive. Thus, for 100% of other combinations of human partners, they 'might' lead to another life, but certainly not 'ME'"
With the same argument you could "prove" that no one would ever win in a lottery due to the improbability of this. The flaw lies in mixing different probability concepts. There are millions of lottery tickets issued, thus the probability of someone winning is a hundred percent. Were there only one ticket ever issued, winning would certainly require some further explanation - at least for a curious scientist.
The same applies to the universe.
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For most of the past time of the universe, Carbon Based (CB) life was impossible. For most of the future time of the universe, CB life will again be impossible. As a matter of fact, if the universe truly is flat and ever expanding, then as the universes age approaches infinity, the window where CB life is sustainable approaches zero, thus making this universe devoid of life and asymptotically raising the probability that life doesn't exist in this universe to 100%.
Mostly true, though in fact for most of the past time, about 10 billion years, carbon based life was very well possible. But this is not the point here. It's about under which conditions life it possible at all at one time in the universe.
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And I agree with Whine that this whole dicussion is grossly ethnocentric and assumes that CB life is teh only type of life. We have no way of knowing there isn't some other form of life that can evolve in the quark-gluon plasma at the birst of the universe nor can we say with certainty that life won't evolve into something else in the cold, dark ends of time.
This is correct, but still not the point. Development of intelligent life, no matter whether based on carbon, silicon, or unknown processes requires an energy source and an environment allowing evolution. For instance, in a universe filled with nothing but a thin expanding gas - and that's a much more likely universe than ours - life can not develop.
BTW I like the rock images, too.
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Re: Das Anthropische Prinzip / The Universe Parado
[Re: jcl]
#63659
02/13/06 02:50
02/13/06 02:50
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Joined: Mar 2003
Posts: 5,377 USofA
fastlane69
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Quote:
With the same argument you could "prove" that no one would ever win in a lottery due to the improbability of this.
Please expand on this. My birth statement is factual: if my mom and dad hadn't procreated, I would not be alive, yet these is no mystery to my existence or how I came to be. However, your universal birth statement is not factual: if the constants do not align correctly, we have no way of knowing that in fact CB life won't again exist at some point in time in the past or future. But I have no idea where your lottery statement fits in.
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There are millions of lottery tickets issued, thus the probability of someone winning is a hundred percent.
Absolutely not...the probability of someone winning is not 100%...We see empirical evidence of this all the time: Tickets can get lost and people may not know they win and thus never claim their prize. As a matter of fact, this causes the jackpot to increase and leads to much joy and fanfare in the US.
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Were there only one ticket ever issued, winning would certainly require some further explanation - at least for a curious scientist.
Assuming I don't lose the winning ticket, this is an example of pulling a mystery out of circular logic...One winning ticket is issued, I have that ticket, so I win. What further explanation is needed?
A curious scientist with only one data point would hardly spend any time musing on how that one data point came to be...they would just accept that this is all they can get for the time being and move on. Remember that scientists are not numerologist...we use numbers as a tool, not as a divining method...if we see "42" come out of our calculations, we don't instantly scream "OMG, Douglas Adams was right! How did he know??" nor if we see 666 do we scream "The devil!! the devil!!". Likewise, realizing that the constants of nature are balanced (for now) so that we can live is just a fact and inspires no more scientific curiosity than wondering why DOG spelled backwards is GOD.
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The same applies to the universe.
I assume that in your analogy, the tickets are the universe. If that's the case (and again, I'm working with a core mis-understanding of what you are trying to say with your lottery analogy), then you are saying that if one million universes are issued, teh probability of life existing on one of them is 100% (where life=winning) since we are alive. But by using the lottery, you have skewed the analogy to state that only one universe can have life and the others can't (since in a lottery, only one person wins). But it is certainly possible that in this galactic lottery, everyone is a winner (CB or non-CB life is everywhere) and since we only know that we are the winner (and don't know the other winners), we feel like something special is going on.
Another way to interpret your analogy is that the tickets are the constants in nature. In this case, the millions of lottery tickets represent the millions of possibilities for these constants to combine. But as above, you are working with the assumption that only one ticket wins (our ticket; our constants) and that the other tickets are losers. Again we don't know that this is anything special since we have no way of stating that other non-CB life doesn't exist nor that other unknown physical processes won't again lead to the conditions necessary for CB life.
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BTW I like the rock images, too.
In their case, one would never question that some concrete physical process or at worst, just "coincidence" enabled them to balance, yet when people are confronted with balance on a cosmic scale, there "obviously" must be something non-physical to it.
Ultimitely, these questions remain in the realm of philosophy and meta-physics and thus everyone's opinion is as good as the other, but they do not cross over into the realm of science.
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Re: Das Anthropische Prinzip / The Universe Parado
[Re: fastlane69]
#63660
02/13/06 05:46
02/13/06 05:46
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 27,986 Frankfurt
jcl
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The question (it's only one) does not cross over because it's already there.
The question of probability for a certain event, be it a certain nuclear reaction or a Big Bang with a certain combination of nature constants, is essential for science. Such a question - or more precise, why a certain event does happen despite the current theory says it's unlikely - can lead to important discoveries.
In my opionion the Universe Paradox is among the 10..20 most important scientific questions at the beginning of this century. Sure, the God explanation won't get us much further, but once we understand more about the laws of physics in time scales below Planck time, we can seriously examine into explanations 3) and 4), and can possibly find the answer to the question.
As to the lottery anlogy, I admit that I don't know your US lottery rules. In German lottery there are always several winners, thus the universe analogy would probably indeed work with our lottery only. Especially since when multiple universes exist, there are probably infinitely many. Thus, the probability for intelligent life would indeed be 100%. But I think you got my point
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Re: Das Anthropische Prinzip / The Universe Parado
[Re: jcl]
#63661
02/13/06 08:32
02/13/06 08:32
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Joined: Mar 2003
Posts: 5,377 USofA
fastlane69
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Quote:
why a certain event does happen despite the current theory says it's unlikely - can lead to important discoveries.
While far from dismissing scientific curiosity, when it comes to this question, I strongly disagree with the core assumption that say's that our universes present configuration is likely or unlikely...
No one has any basis of comparason for that statement and the only "proof" offered is that if the constants were different, then life wouldn't exsist.
Well, in order for the constants to be different, the physics would be different and then all bets are off and we can say anything we want!
Hence you can say that changing the constants would lead to no CB life and I can say changing the constants changes the physics and that this new physics would lead again lead to CB life and there is no way for either of us to be proven right or wrong...hence there is no way that this line of questioning will ever lead to discovery since it's fundamentally nothing more than the question "Why are we here?" but with physical constants thrown in just to make things more interesting.
So while I ceratainly encourage people to find out why these constants are what they are, the idea that these the constants are "special" and somehow tied into life in this universe is just philosophy and not science.
BTW, I'm not trying to be thick-headed, but I really didn't get your point about the lottery as a counter-point to my father/mother/son circular arguement.
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Re: Das Anthropische Prinzip / The Universe Parado
[Re: Matt_Aufderheide]
#63665
04/13/06 02:58
04/13/06 02:58
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Joined: Feb 2004
Posts: 718 Wisconsin
Irish_Farmer
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This isn't a very interesting question (no offense). For me it doesn't go far back enough to the foundation. Sure, there could have been slight changes that would change everything (except the core of physics) so what Matt said is true. Its pointless to ask why, because the simple fact of us being able to ask the question is kind of the answer to the question.
"I'm here because I can ask why I'm here," if you will. That may be circular reasoning, but in the context of the argument, that's as far as you need to go. At least in my opinion anyways.
The truly interesting question for me is one that science will never be able to explain...ever. Maybe you can try and prove me wrong, but from what I've heard from scientists, they've had to dodge this question.
If the universe also began in a sort of primordial state, where it was either smaller than it is now (relative to what? maybe it would be more accurate to say that relative to infinite space, all of matter was compacted into a tiny sphere), or literally nothing existed which became something, you're just begging the question. Where did this more basic universe come from? Something more basic? Where did that come from? Eventually it will all have to lead back to nothing. Saying it was always there is a cop out. You can say time keeps circling back on itself, but then why is there even time at all? Or to say that the probability of the existence of anything is 100% in this case also begs the question, where did probability come from? To say that it always existed is simply to take for granted its existence.
That's all I have to say, I don't want to hijack the discussion so you can continue on if you please.
However, it didn't seem to me that in JCL's original post, he was talking about changing constants. He was simply asking what if conditions hadn't been just right. Which definately is different than asking what it would mean if the physical laws of our universe were different, but I could be wrong about who said what.
Last edited by Irish_Farmer; 04/13/06 03:02.
"The task force finds that...the unborn child is a whole human being from the moment of fertilization, that all abortions terminate the life of a human being, and that the unborn child is a separate human patient under the care of modern medicine."
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